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Prelude

This page summarizes a proposal of changes to Python packaging guidelines, that should occur with switch to Python 3 as a default, as proposed in [1] (will be referred to as Change).

Changes in Package Naming and SRPM <-> RPM Relations

Current State

python-* packages (built with Python 2) are installed by default (from LiveCD, as dependencies of applications that require some Python packages) and by yum install python-foo. Python 3 packages are named python3-* and are installed by yum install python3-foo.

From the packaging point of view, this is achieved by either

Having one SRPM python-foo that produces python-foo and python3-foo binary RPMs.

Future State Implied by the Change

After the switch, python3-* packages are going to be installed by default (from LiveCD, as dependencies of applications that require some Python packages).

Proposal for Further Changes

A brief discussion already happened at [2].

SRPMs that produce binary RPMs for more Python runtimes should keep current names (python-foo).

SRPMs that produce binary RPM for just one runtime should be named pythonX-foo.

Every binary RPM must be named pythonX-foo, where X is the major version of the Python runtime that it uses.

For the time being (and maybe forever), every python2-foo package must have Provides: python-foo.

This means that from user's perspective only one thing will change, and that is python-* packages will be renamed to python2-*, but will still keep the provide of python-*.

Why?

This concept will easily scale to more Python runtimes (PyPy, Jython), as already proposed previously by Tom Spur. Please note, that scaling to other runtimes is not part of this proposal and should be discussed further in another proposal/ML thread.

Currently, upstream recommendation [3] is to point /usr/bin/python to Python 2, but as the PEP notes, it will be reviewed and it is anticipated that in time it will be updated to recommend pointing /usr/bin/python to /usr/bin/python3. When this time comes, we should also move the provides suggested above (Provides: python-foo) from python2-* packages to python3-* packages to keep things like yum install /usr/bin/python python-foo consistent.

Having python2-* vs. python3-* packages is a good way of explicitly distinguishing packages from the two stacks. This is connected with the reason above - we should recommend explicit usage of /usr/bin/python{2,3} and yum install python{2,3}-foo, and we should discourage use of implicit /usr/bin/python and python-* so that nothing breaks for users when these are changed in any way. (We already started to advertise usage of versioned /usr/bin/python{2,3} binary by deprecating %__python in current guidelines and recommending %__python{2,3} instead.)

Alternatives

Just keep what we have - doesn't seem to scale to other Python runtimes; doesn't allow explicit naming (python2-foo vs. python3-foo) while keeping the possibility to move Provides: python-foo to python3-foo in the future.

Only allow split SRPMs - seems to be too much maintenance work.

Example Specfile

Example of what a specfile would look like follows. Everything works in the same way as it does now with building python3-* subpackages; the same approach is applied to python2-* subpackages.

This specfile will produce two binary RPMs, python2-six and python3-six. Any of them can be disabled by setting with_python{2,3} to 0:

%prep, %build, %install and %check sections look pretty much the same, each has to explictly switch the directory to the respective py{2,3}dir. I believe we could come up with some macros that would make this easier and more readable (TODO).